High-schooler Ethan travels across the globe to Hong Kong and beyond to help his friend Tianna find her missing activist father. Their desperate search sheds light on many of the political issues that exist in current U.S-China relations. Epilogue, Background Notes,

An enjoyable, edifying, and ultimately passionate book. Nine Days is somewhat misleadingly marketed as a young adult thriller in the spirit of James Patterson. While I have not read any James Patterson, it is hard to believe it is much like this. Nine Days has a good plot that keeps you turning the pages through the short, rapid-fire chapters, as you go from the United States to Hong Kong to Vietnam and back to Hong Kong and the United States.

But the book is really a passionate case for human rights, an argument that individual actions (even by a high school student) can make a difference, and a condemnation of practices like human trafficking. These themes come through increasingly clearly as you read and are made completely manifest when you read the real story it was inspired by (also involving a girl named Ti-Anna, like the heroine of Nine Days) and Fred Hiatt's afterword. In that sense, the books seems to attempt to bait-and-switch young thrill-seeking readers into something that they will really learn from.

I also thought the two main characters were well drawn, Ethan as an earnest American boy and Ti-Anna as a smart, self assured, and consistently optimistic daughter of an exiled Chinese dissident.

Overall, would recommend it for any age. ( )

This isn't the kind of book I generally read, and I'm not sure how much it will get checked out in my library, but I hope it does because it deals with some very important issues. We don't hear too much about political activists in China, or about human trafficking. Both of those issues are dealt with in this book in a way that makes it both exciting to read and also very informative. It made me want to educate myself more on the Chinese Cultural Revolution because I don't know much about it at all. Ethan and Ti-Anna are very likable characters (Ethan's constant need for food is endearing),and while some of the situations they get themselves involved in are a little implausible, it adds tension and interest to the story. I love that the author put the "real" Ti-Anna's story in at the end of the book. All in all I'm really glad I read it and I recommend it. ( )

Based on a true story of 2 teens who go to China to try to rescue one of the main characters father. ( )